This is just a quick heads up that we’ll exhibit at FroSCon 2010 this weekend.

We’re looking forward to two days of nice chatting with friends, customers and new people. The FroSCon schedule has lots of interesting talks again and lots of nice open source projects and companies which are running a booth.

Our main product this year will be bytemine cryptorage. We will show how it works and what you can do with it. Oh, we will also give away voucher codes to interested people for testing cryptorage.

So drop by at our booth! :)

(there is a german variant of this article available here)

Behälter KG, a company from Bremen, Germany, is among the leaders in sales of used special steel containers in Europe. Their storage contains roughly 1500 containers on 15.000 square meters.

The successful collaboration between bytemine and Behälter KG began in 2008 as the container databases were redesigned. This was done as part of the website relaunch with the aim of easing the task of finding suitable containers online. In order to meet the customer requirements at their best and being able to easily handle any changing requirements in the future, the web framework Ruby on Rails was chosen.

Ruby on Rails supports the developers to achieve high-quality results even in face of changing requirements in the development process. Later requirements and changes of functionality can be easily integrated.

By now the rails application has been deeply integrated into the daily workflow of Behälter KG and has become one of the company’s central applications.

“The new container database enables us to assist our customers even better”, says Peter Schüler, “and shortens the time to find a suitable container, while delivering all the necessary details, such as technical specs, images and drawings”.

For Peter Schüler the collaboration with bytemine means to work with an innovative service provider who values future-oriented thinking highly and regards customer satisfaction as his prime concern.

“Since the launch of the new online container database our customers find containers much easier”, observes Peter Schüler, CEO of Behälter KG.

bytemine has been a Zarafa Partner since late 2008. Since 2009 we’re a certified partner and have done quite a few Zarafa projects so far.

What is Zarafa?

Zarafa is an Open Source Collaboration, providing:

• Integration with your existing Linux mailserver
• Native mobile phone support
• Outlook “Look & Feel” webaccess
• Stable Outlook sharing (100% MAPI)

A lot more details about Zarafa can be found on their official website.

We’re not only offering various services such as conceptual work, deployment and integration, maintenance as well as 24/7 standby for Zarafa, but also offer Zarafa hosting on our Xen-Cluster located at our rack in Frankfurt connected to Kleyrex Internet Exchange.

Among the customers we’ve successfully migrated to Zarafa are:

• PSA Automation GmbH
• Banking Concepts AG
• Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg GmbH

While Miniatur Wunderland as well as Banking Concepts AG are running on their own infrastructure, taken care of by us, PSA Automation GmbH is taking advantage of our hosted Zarafa.

As I tweeted this morning, news.bytemine.net is shutting down. This is kind of the end of an era, I’ve been providing free usenet access for the last eleven years. The first six years through the usenet node news.hazardous.org, the last five years bytemine hosted the service on news.bytemine.net.

Admiddently news.bytemine.net was never a huge site. We had the Big8, most of the german-language hierarchies plus a few selected others. However non-binary traffic has decreased over the last years and – to be honest – the significance of usenet has decreased much as well. Added to that, news.bytemine.net has been running in auto-pilot mode for the last couple of years, so obviously my interest in usenet has decreased as well. These were a few arguments in the debate on whether to shutdown the service or not. The most significant issue was, that the machine that news.bytemine.net ran on simply uses too much power for the small benefit it brings to a few users (who can easily use one of the bigger sites for usenet), and because interest in usenet has decreased more and more, I did not want to invest the time in moving the service to a different maschine. Because news.bytemine.net ran on a Sun Ultra-10 workstation moving the service to a machine with different endianess, would’ve meant lots of work if the news spool was meant to be kept.

On a side note: Usenet is responsible for me getting into this whole Unix / Linux thing. Back in ‘97 I became interested in usenet and quickly noticed that if I wanted to run a usenet site, I would have to do it on Unix, since I did not want to run such a service on a Windows machine.

[11:43] fkr(news):~ %> sudo shutdown -hp now
Shutdown NOW!
shutdown: [pid 2700]
[11:44] fkr(news):~ %>                                                                                
*** FINAL System shutdown message from fkr@news.bytemine.net ***             
System going down IMMEDIATELY                                                  

System shutdown time has arrived
Connection to news closed by remote host.
Connection to news closed.

Farewell news.bytemine.net.

Some time has passed since we published news of the bytemine manager, but we try hard to invest more time in this project. To prove this we recently added some features and improvements to the bytemine manager:

• Update bouncycastle library from 1.4.4 to 1.4.5.
• On SSH connections after 3 false login attempts the connection gets aborted.
• Windows executable file is delivered for easier startup on Windows systems.
• The panel widths in the server/user overview can be changed by the user. This setting is saved and restored on every startup of the application.
• For new users and servers an individual expiration period can be specified.
• Users are no longer imported from the passwd file on synchronisation. Only users existing in the manager connected to the server are exported into the passwd file. Use the global import function to import users from a passwd file.
• Revoked users are better visible on first sight.
• Client certificates are no longer copied to the concentrators.
• New function to renew existing, non-revoked certificates.

Since we open sourced the bytemine manager a while ago you can checkout the latest stable version from github: bytemine manager on github.

Please feel free to report bugs and errors, ask for new features, or simply give us feedback on how you like that software.

Because we apparently did not communicate this straight up: We offer two years warranty on Alix and Soekris products. Nothing new, you might think, this is already defined in EU directive 1999/44/EG. But what makes this special is that we also offer this warranty to companies, not only to private customers.

We also clarified this in our shop descriptions.

Well, we finally realized what has been long overdue: Our website is available in english!

With english being the primary language in your browser, you should automatically be redirected to the english version, if not there is a language switcher.

There is not really much to say except: Sorry it took us so long. After providing our software in english along with english manuals, blog posts, and a growing number of international customers and partners it was necessary to set this important step towards lowering the barrier for English-speaking people to get in touch with bytemine.

If you enjoy our english website, you likely are looking forward to our shop being available in english soon as well. We’re working on this and as soon as CeBIT has passed by can devote more time to it.

Last saturday bytemine started into the conference season 2010. Well, not quite. We’ve started into the conference season as an exhibitor. The visiting conference schedule was begun by Bernd attending Fosdem 2010.

At the 4. Linux-Informationstag Oldenburg (“4th Linux-Informationday”) we’ve been one of the main sponsors, while this is a local and regional event for us it is like a homecoming game, as it is the only linux event in Oldenburg.

The day itself was quite nice. It is always good to hear how much visitors like the way we represent the company and our products.

Felix gave a presentation on OpenVPN and also represented the german OpenVPN Association. The slides from his (my) talk can be found on our website.

By the way, we do sell the ‘bytewear’ visible on the photo. We have hoodies, polos, various shirts and even bathrobes. This as a small note until we finally get around to add them to our online shop.

Next stop on our conference schedule: CeBIT 2010.

Ever since we started selling Soekris systems, people would forget to order a power supply with it. To the point at which we now always ask whether or not a power supply is needed. I really wonder why it took until today, that we actually start offering them bundled. So, there is now a bundle with a Soekris 5501-70 in the desktop case, one 2.0A power supply as well as a SanDisk 2GB compact flash.

We made the same style bundle for the PC Engines Alix 2d13 system as well.

You can find all the bundles in the bundle section of our shop.

I did wonder previously whether this would also make sense for the 19” variant. Any opinions?

Am 13. Februar 2010 findet in Oldenburg wieder der Linux-Informationstag statt. Die Veranstaltung findet wie die letzten Male in den Räumen des KDO (Zweckverband Kommunale Datenverarbeitung Oldenburg) statt. Eine Anfahrtsbeschreibung findet sich hier.

Als Unternehmen aus Oldenburg begrüßen wir das Engagement der Organisatoren und unterstützen die Veranstaltung so weit wie möglich.

bytemine wird auf dem 4. Linux-Informationstag mit einem Stand sowie einem Vortrag präsent sein. An unserem Stand werden wir unter anderem die kommende Version des bytemine manager präsentieren, sowie auch unsere bytemine openbsd appliance ausstellen. Einen Prototyp der kommenden Erweiterung der Hardware-Plattform der bytemine openbsd appliance werden wir ebenfalls vorstellen.

Seit heute ist auch das Vortragsprogramm veröffentlicht. Ich werde einen Vortrag zum Thema OpenVPN halten. Inhaltlich liegt der Schwerpunkt hierbei auf Einsatzszenarien abseits von “08/15” Setups. So behandelt der Vortrag unter anderem auch die Authentifizierung gegen LDAP.

Wie die letzten Jahre sind wir auch wieder finanzieller Unterstützer der Veranstaltung, zusätzlich freuen wir uns darüber, dass wir den Linux-Informationstag dieses Jahr auch mit dem Hosting der Webseite unterstützen können.